The Silent Girls (22 page)

His first instinct was to tear the place apart, use the chair and smash the place to smithereens and sort through the wreckage until he found what he wanted. But that would bring trouble. Though the girl had been easy enough to dispose of, Edie wouldn’t be. Rage coursed through him, making his hands shake and his jaw clench; he needed to think. There wasn’t time to search the house, there wasn’t time to do anything but give Pascoe what he wanted and have the whole thing over with. Shit!

Taking a huge breath he forced himself to put everything back as he’d found it, he’d disturbed some dust, but hoped that Edie would put it down to the girl poking round. The girl! She might be the answer. She’d stayed in the house, she’d been helping with the clear out, she might know something – and if she didn’t, she might be useful in other ways. Hadn’t his mother said that Edie had become excessively fond of the kid?

Sam wasn’t sure how far he’d need to take this yet – Edie was a sap, it wouldn’t take much to push her where he needed her to go. The girl might need to play a part in that, and when it was done, when he got what he came for, well, a tragic fire wouldn’t be out of the way. It would serve her right, she should have agreed to let him take the place off her hands and left everything the way it was. He’d given her an easy option and she’d turned it down. He thought about the girl again, her value as his trump card… he needed to think it through first, work out how best to play it, and for that he needed Edie to think the girl had left of her own accord.

It didn’t take long to find her backpack and the few bits of clothing she’d left lying on the bedroom floor. He took it all and let himself out of the back door. There was no way he was going to lug the girl’s junk around with him and the car was parked two streets away, well out of the sight of any of Pascoe’s cronies. His intention was to throw the bag into the nearest dustbin, but unfortunately someone else was having the same idea and heaving a black sack into their bin when Sam emerged into the alley. Rather than be spotted doing something unusual he simply nodded at the man, walked through the gate of the empty house and dumped the bag in the garden. He waited five minutes, checked that the coast was clear and walked back to collect his car.

***

Edie made her way back from Lionel’s, skirting the now familiar sight of the murder tourists as she crossed the communal garden. She paused for a moment, listening to the guide’s spiel, wondering if it was really possible that they had got it all wrong and that her father had been responsible for the terrible things the man was describing. The insipid dishwater-and-perfume tea washed around her stomach and threatened to make a re-appearance as he described in graphic detail what had happened to Jean Lockwood, the girl who had been found strangled, assaulted and mutilated on a park bench.

Edie turned away. She didn’t want to hear any more, not from this man with his salacious spin on past events. Reaching the end of the short path that led up to the door of Number 17, she hesitated. Raking through the detritus of Dolly’s neglect seemed about as appealing in that moment as the thought of another cup of the foul tea. The last place she wanted to be was inside Number 17, there seemed to be more skeletons lurking inside the closet than she could throw a stick at and she felt as if she was all out of sticks anyway.

For a moment she contemplated visiting Lena, but something about Number 15 told her that the house was empty – besides, Lena wasn’t the person she really wanted to see. That person was Matt, and she was loath to admit it, even to herself.

There was only one problem, she had no idea where he lived. It had to be on or near the square – Sophie knew, but asking her would mean going back into the house and she wasn’t ready to do that, not yet anyway. If she was going to go back in there and face her demons she wanted to get the measure of them first. Someone in the square would know, but who to ask? It occurred to her that, being a single man of a certain age, it was possible that one of the street girls might know, that he might have had dealings with them. The thought was easily shaken off – her yardstick for judging men was Simon, and just because he was the sort to take it where he could get it, it didn’t mean that every man was the same. Besides, Matt might be full of accusations and aspersions but he’d never given her the impression that he had contempt for women. In fact, he was the type more likely to give the girls money for a hot meal than cross their palms for sex. They would probably laugh at him for it, but take his money anyway and spend it on their next bag of smack.

She sighed, the square was getting to her. Its inherent toxicity was seeping into her bones and making her as mean spirited and feral as the rest of its inhabitants. She turned away from the house and this time walked around the edge of the gardens, eyeing the tourists as if they were zoo animals separated from her by the bars of the metal fence. She was so focused on the flickering, intermittent image of the tightly clustered group that she didn’t notice the man coming towards her, and in her second serendipitous meeting that week, bumped smack bang into Matt.

He’d put his arm out to stop her, and the physical contact shot through her like a bolt. ‘Sorry, I was miles away, I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ she mumbled, stupidly unable to meet his eyes and feeling as though her thoughts had conjured him out of the ether as some kind of mockery.

He gave that frown, the one that made him look like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’

She laughed; it felt more like hysteria than humour. ‘Honestly? I don’t know. I’ve been brushing up on my family history this morning, and it’s been quite a revelation. Funnily enough I was looking for you, we need to talk.’

He looked surprised. ‘We do?’

Edie knew that she had treated him as if he was public enemy number one, and he had no reason to want to comply with her after the way she had behaved the night before, yet she also knew that he needed her to believe him, no matter what it might cost her. ‘If you don’t mind. I’d like to see what you’ve found.’

Sophie breaking in had been one thing, voluntarily taking Edie to the seedy bedsit was another. Letting someone in to willingly observe his obsessions made Matt feel distinctly uncomfortable – he felt exposed and embarrassed by his collection, realising that to Edie’s eyes it marked him out as a weirdo. She took it all in good part, quietly ignoring his unmade bed, the clothes piled on the back of the chair and the remains of his last takeaway which still languished on the draining board, congealed and attracting flies. Her attention was taken by the desk, its contents and what lay above pinned to the wall and looking like a bad mock-up of something from CSI – though he’d never thought of it like that before. A flush of embarrassment threatened to ravage the last of his dignity as he recognised how it all must look to someone else.

She looked at it all for a long time, reading the sticky notes, following the red strings from the faces of the women to the locations of their deaths on the map that formed the centre of his web of evidence. He pottered about behind her, surreptitiously tidying up while she perused his life’s work. She turned and caught him red-handed with a pair of dirty boxer shorts in his hand. She was holding a file. ‘May I?’ she asked.

He waved his free hand in an expansive gesture. ‘Help yourself, look at anything you like.’
Just don’t comment on my poor housekeeping
he thought, annoyed that her good opinion of him should matter so much. He could understand her reluctance to believe his theory, and could empathise with her reaction. He hadn’t wanted to be the child of a killer either and he had to agree that passing the buck was unlikely to really achieve anything. The need for vindication was ingrained in him, he couldn’t shake it off even if he tried and he hoped after her previous reaction that she had seen that and had understood it.

She lowered herself into his desk chair and began to flick through the file. ‘Any chance of a cup of something, I don’t mind what – as long as it’s not Earl Grey.’

He gave her an embarrassed half laugh, wondering what she took him for. Did he look like a man who would drink poncey tea? ‘I can do bog standard tea or coffee?’

She didn’t look up, but leaned forward peering at the file, a concerned frown knitting her brow. ‘Either, I don’t mind,’ she said absently.

He filled the kettle, desperate to know what she was thinking. He wanted to grab the files, show her all of the important bits and guide her thoughts on what had happened all those years ago, but he dare not. It was achievement enough that she was sitting in his room taking any notice at all.

He made her a cup of coffee and sat on the chair drinking his own, while hers sat on the desk and went cold as she got more and more absorbed by the contents of his files. Eventually she spoke; he had become so used to the silence, only punctuated by the rustling of paper as she flicked through the pages, that he felt as though he had been hypnotised in some way and had lost a chunk of time. ‘So, my father disappeared on the same day that yours was executed… why? Why would he leave then, another man had taken the blame, he was free to get on with it.’

Matt nodded. ‘I know, it doesn’t really make sense. I’ve often assumed that he must have felt guilty, but would a man capable of such brutal murders have the capacity to feel guilt?’

Edie shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not sure that I know anything any more, you’re not the only one who seems to know more about my family than I do.’ She sighed and put the file that she had been reading back on the desk. ‘I can see that you tried to trace him, but that there were no leads. No one saw him, no one heard from him. Why do you think that the police didn’t take more notice of him leaving?’

‘Dickie made the report, but your mother and your aunt were adamant that he’d just walked out.’

‘So I suppose that they weren’t that concerned about a grown man abandoning his family.’ She rubbed her face with her hands; she looked tired. ‘Tell me again why you are so sure that your father was innocent?’

Matt gave her a wry smile ‘Because he said so? Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? He wrote my mother a letter from prison, swearing on my life that he was innocent, and yes, of course she believed it. The thing was, he admitted to the affair with Sally Pollett – he’d admitted it to her before Sally was killed, he had no motive, she couldn’t do him any harm. The prosecution said that he’d killed her because she had threatened to expose their affair, but he’d already fronted up.’

Edie nodded. ‘OK, but that doesn’t explain the others.’ She waved her hand at the wall indicating the small sea of faces that Matt had pinned there.

‘No, it doesn’t, but he wasn’t tried or convicted for killing them, just Sally. Because the way she was found mimicked what had gone before, it was just assumed that he had. There was only enough evidence to try him for her.’

Edie’s eyebrows rose, ‘That’s almost inconceivable!’

‘Now yes, but back then… it’s just like the Christie case.’

Edie leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees. ‘When I first arrived and went to the house I told Rose that it was just like 10 Rillington Place, seems somewhat ironic now.’ She rested her chin on her clasped hands for a moment. ‘I’ve read your files, looked at what you’ve found… but I still can’t work out what my father’s motive would have been. I talked to someone this morning who told me a little about what kind of man he was, but I still can’t quite get my head around it.’

‘It’s always been the bugbear for me too, until Sophie found what she did under the floorboards. I think it was revenge, for your grandmother.’

Edie looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

Matt sighed and stood up, then walked across the room to put his empty cup on the draining board. ‘As I understand it, they were very close. Frank was Beattie’s favourite, when he got called up she was devastated – I’ve been told that’s what tripped her up where her conviction was involved, she made a mistake and injured a girl, which was what led to her arrest.’

Edie nodded, it fitted what Lionel had told her earlier.

‘I think Frank took it out on the girls that had been to his mother for an abortion, I think he blamed them for bringing the family to its knees, and I think that was his motive.’ He pointed to the pictures on the wall behind her head. ‘I couldn’t prove it until now, and I’m still not sure that I can, but the notebook that Sophie found has dates, amounts and initials, some correspond to those women’s initials. I know, it may still be a coincidence, but I do know for a fact that at least three of them visited your grandmother and paid her for an abortion. I was able to interview their families, well, what’s left of them anyway.’

Edie frowned. ‘What about the other two?’

Matt shook his head ‘Sally Pollett has no family left and Elizabeth Rees’s refused to talk to me.’

‘So if these people knew that their daughter, sister, whatever she was had had an illegal abortion, why didn’t they make the connection and point the finger?’

Matt sat down again and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Because it was years before the killings started.’

‘Out of curiosity, how did you get these people to talk to you?’

Matt looked away, his face flushing red. ‘I lied, I told them I was a criminologist doing research for a book about the murders.’

Edie nodded slowly. ‘I see.’

They sat in silence for a moment or two, Matt unable to look at Edie and actively avoiding her stare. He’d just played his hand and told her that he would lie to get his way. It was hardly something that would endear him to her.

Finally she spoke. ‘OK, we go back to the house, I have plenty more to do and the sooner it’s done the better. You can help, if you find anything that adds…’ she waved a hand at his collection ‘… to this, you’re welcome to it. But I have to be honest and tell you that it all feels like it’s a bit too late.’

‘You may be right, but I have to finish this.’

She stood up. ‘Come on then, let’s get on with it. Sophie will be wondering where I am.’

Astounded by her capitulation, but unwilling to forgo this opportunity, Matt followed her.